Sydney Sweeney is seemingly at a crossroads in her career, following her record-breaking return to form in The Housemaid, with more intriguing roles on the horizon. In fact, the two movies in which Sweeney is slated to star over the next year will demand by far her most accomplished performances as a lead actor.

Both Scandalous and The Custom of the Country feature protagonists of the kind of complexity and depth that she’s yet to encounter in her acting career. While her casting as Kim Novak in the race-relations biopic Scandalous has drawn more attention so far, it’s the latter project which has the potential to be Sweeney’s best movie role to date.

A period satire set at the turn of the 20th century, The Custom of the Country will bring Edith Wharton’s great American novel to the screen for the very first time. Following The Housemaid’s unprecedented box-office success, this adaptation of Wharton’s book is being co-produced by Sweeney’s own company Fifty-Fifty Films, alongside Studiocanal, Rabbit’s Foot Films, and Monumental Pictures.

More importantly, she’s starring as the movie’s central character, the scheming social climber Undine Spragg. According to Screen Global Production, filming has already started in Lisbon, Portugal with Mary Queen of Scots director Josie Rourke at the helm. Provided that Sweeney’s lead performance goes down well, it has Oscar bait written all over it.

Sydney Sweeney Will Play The Lead Role In The Custom Of The Country

A screen adaptation of The Customer of the Country has been a long time coming. It’s one of the few books universally regarded as a “Great American Novel” that hasn’t made it to cinema or television at all until now. A tale of unbridled ambition and machiavellian manipulation, it’s a timeless comedy of manners with a brutally dark heart.

American director Sofia Coppola was attached to make an Apple TV version of the story starring Florence Pugh in 2020, prior to the prospective show losing its financing. Now, Sydney Sweeney will become the first Undine Spragg in screen history. The Custom of the Country’s lead role is a challenge the like of which Sweeney will never have faced before.

Spragg is a nouveau-riche Midwesterner looking to augment her social status by marrying in New York during the aftermath of the Gilded Age. Despite proving to be an attractive proposition for various men in high society as she desires, she initially falls for a struggling lawyer and aspiring poet, whose old-money background offers little in the way of material wealth.

This romance sets in motion a chain of events which exposes the rapacious greed at the core of the social system to which Undine Spragg subscribes. Her adverse character transformation during the course of Edith Wharton’s novel is something Sydney Sweeney will do well to transfer to the screen.

Sydney Sweeney’s Portrayal Of Undine Spragg Could Define Her Career

If Sydney Sweeney gets her portrayal of Undine Spragg right, she’ll unquestionably demonstrate a range and depth of performance that we haven’t seen from her up to this point. Amid the highly-publicized dispute over Sweeney playing Kim Novak in Scandalous, her role in The Custom of the Country is exactly what the actor needs to bolster her reputation.

This role could go down as a key turning point in her career when she finally stops being unfairly dismissed as a typecast buxom bombshell and comes into her own as a performer of real talent. What’s more, Undine Spragg is precisely the kind of part that could generate Oscar buzz around Sweeney, given its historical import.

Admittedly, Josie Rourke’s relative inexperience and checkered history as a writer-director could count against Sweeney. But for film enthusiasts and fans of classic literature alike, <em>The Custom of the Country</em> is still the most exciting big-screen project the actor has ever been involved in.